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Cereal Left-Overs: Muffins
Rice and Cornmeal Muffins. cupful white cornmeal, cupful flour, ¼ teaspoonful salt, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, 1 cupful cold rice, 1½ cupfuls milk, 2 eggs, 2 tablespoonfuls butter.
Sift the dry ingredients together, rub the rice in lightly with the tips CEREAL LEFT-OVERS of the fingers till every grain is separated. Beat the yolks of eggs till thick, mix with the milk, pour over the dry ingredients, and beat well. Add the melted butter, and last the whites of the eggs beaten to a dry froth. Bake in hot oven.
Cream Rice Pudding. 2 tablespoonfuls cold boiled rice, 3 tablespoonfuls sugar, Yolk 1 egg, 3 tablespoonfuls cornstarch, 2 cupfuls milk, teaspoonful McIlhenny's Mexican vanilla.
Put the milk with the cold rice in a double boiler, add the sugar and salt. When it boils, add the cornstarch wet in a few tablespoonfuls cold milk. Just before it is ready to take from the fire, add the egg and flavoring. Eat cold with whipped cream.
Rice Croquettes. 1½ cupfuls cold rice, teaspoonful salt, Yolks 2 eggs, 1 tablespoonful butter.
Put the rice in a double boiler with a little milk and let it cook until the rice has absorbed the milk. Remove from the fire, add the beaten egg yolks and butter, and spread on a plate. Shape into balls, roll in crumbs, then dent with the finger till the croquette is like a small nest.
Dip in egg, then in crumbs again, fry in deep fat, and drain. Serve hot with a cube of jelly in each nest.
Oatmeal Muffins. cupful scalded milk, 4 tablespoonfuls sugar, ½ teaspoonful salt, yeast cake dissolved in 1 cupful warm water, 1 cupful cold oatmeal, 2½ cupfuls flour.
Scald the milk and add it to the sugar and salt; as soon as it grows lukewarm, add the yeast. Work the flour into the oatmeal with the tips of the fingers and add to the milk.
Beat thoroughly, cover, and allow it to raise over night. In the morning pour into greased iron gem pans and set in a warm place to raise. Bake half an hour.
Farina Muffins. 1 cupful cold farina, 2 cupfuls flour, 3 eggs, teaspoonful salt, 1 teaspoonful sugar, 2 tablespoonfuls melted butter, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, cupfuls milk.
Sift the dry ingredients together and work in the farina. Add the butter, milk, and yolks of the eggs; at the last minute the beaten whites of the eggs. Pour into greased gem pans. Bake twenty minutes in a hot oven.
Fried Mush and Bacon.
Cook slices of bacon in the spider.
A cluster of thrift recipes built on yesterday's cooked cereal, printed with the fractions rubbed out by the scanner and with brand names dropped in by advertisers. Read the quantities with suspicion before you commit.
- Missing fractionsSeveral amounts have lost their fraction marks in the original printing: "cupful white cornmeal," "cupful scalded milk," "cupfuls milk" in the farina muffins, and the vanilla and salt measures. For the rice and cornmeal muffins, equal parts cornmeal and flour (about 1 cup each) with the stated 1½ cups milk gives a normal muffin batter. Where the figure is genuinely unrecoverable, mix to a thick dropping batter rather than trusting the page.
- Hot oven"Hot" in books of this period is usually taken as somewhere in the 400-450F range; the page itself gives no figure. The farina muffins at twenty minutes and the cornmeal ones at roughly the same will be done when the tops spring back; for the oatmeal muffins, being yeast-risen and baked half an hour, the lower end of that range suits better so the interior sets before the crust hardens.
- Gem pans and the spiderIron gem pans are heavy cast-iron muffin pans. They want greasing and preheating in the oven so the batter hits hot metal. A "spider" is a cast-iron frying pan, originally footed for hearth use.
- FarinaFarina is milled wheat, sold now as Cream of Wheat or plain farina. Cold leftover cooked farina is stiff; the recipe says only to "work in the farina," and the fingertip rubbing used elsewhere on this page is the way to keep it from staying in lumps.
- Yeast cakeA yeast cake of the period was a compressed cake, commonly around half to two-thirds of an ounce, though sizes varied by maker. One standard packet of active dry yeast (2¼ teaspoons) substitutes. The overnight rise assumes a cool early-twentieth-century kitchen; in a warm modern room the batter can be refrigerated overnight instead.
- Brand namesCalumet baking powder and "McIlhenny's Mexican vanilla" are named brands of the day, of the kind that often appear in commercially sponsored compilations. Any double-acting baking powder and any vanilla extract will do.
- The rice pudding needs temperingThe egg yolk goes in at the very end, off the direct heat. Whisk a few spoonfuls of the hot mixture into the yolk first, then return it; dropped straight into near-boiling milk it will curdle into threads. Salt is called for in the method but omitted from the list — a pinch.
- CroquettesChill the rice mixture thoroughly before shaping or it will not hold. Fry at 365F until deep gold, two to three minutes, and drain on a rack rather than paper so the crust stays crisp under the jelly.
- YieldOn the quantities as reconstructed, each muffin recipe should give roughly a dozen muffins, though this shifts with however the missing fractions resolve. The cream rice pudding, made with the stated 2 cupfuls milk, serves two to three.
Every entry here starts from cereal already cooked — cold rice, cold oatmeal, cold farina — which tells you how the pre-refrigeration kitchen worked: porridge and boiled rice were made in quantity, kept in the cool larder a day or two, and rebuilt into something else before they spoiled. Fried mush with bacon is older still, an American hearth breakfast in which leftover cornmeal porridge was pressed into a pan, sliced cold and fried. The Calumet and McIlhenny credits point to the early 1900s, when compiled household books not uncommonly carried named brands in the ingredient lists.